Two key stage 2 classes from Heritage Park have been studying the story of the The Iron Man by Ted Hughes as part of their Machines topic and came to the CLC to help bring it to life. In the first session the pupils created an animation of part of the story, using 2D painted backgrounds and characters. This worked particularly well as they had used split pins in the joints of the Iron Man, so that his arms and legs could move. The animations were also quite short and based on action rather than dialogue, which I find is always most effective.

The following week we looked at mechanical sounds and created a soundtrack for the animation. We used the iPads, in particular the Shaker app, and Garageband on the Apple Macs. This contains a large number of loops and sound effects. A couple of groups recorded their own sound effects too.

In the third session, I took our Lego Mindstorm Robots to the school, to do some programming. We look at simple programs to make the robots move forward, backwards, turn and stop. Then we investigated the sound and colour sensors, seeing how loud different sounds were, and what colours the robot could detect.